Category Archives: Books

A type of cipher seemed to operate in my general experience of life. As in a corridor of mirrors, a single image is reflected again and again to an endless depth. Things that I had seen in the past were clearly reflected on those that I encountered for the first time, and I felt that […]

Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, […]

“Talking to you on the phone now is part of the story of my trip to Belgrade, and so is the fight in the café. And when you tell yourself the story of your trip to Hungary, Sanja will be part of it.” “That’s true,” I said. “For a while now I’ve been conscious of […]

A film should stand on its own. It’s absurd if a filmmaker needs to say what a film means in words. The world in the film is a created one, and people sometimes love going into that world. For them that world is real. And if people find out certain things about how something was […]

“This is the uncertain plinth, the moving earth on which we live. Upon this stand the houses, the temples. We have built upon the silt, the drifting sands. Upon a sweeping, undulating, congealed sand-mirror. There in the depths, a different, mysterious river network flows. Certain rivers and rivulets plunge beneath the surface, and they flow […]

I found a book of fables and read two fables about harts. They both ended badly. In “The Hart in the Ox-Stall,” the hart hid from the hunter in an ox-stall. The hunter noticed its antlers sticking out of the straw and killed it, proving that “nothing escapes the master’s eye.” In “The Hart and […]

Here is one final recitation of the five formal practices. Radiant ignition is the first. Sprays of light can bear their own weight or lift something heavy; they can, like a golden envelope, surround an object or, like a glistening worm, move inside it. Rarity, which comes second, is a property belonging to weightless things, […]

As stumbling is the motion of all skating, so skating is the motion of all imagining: picturing requires “a pitch / Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves.” When the sound of sledding or skating is given onomatopoetically, it is usually given as a hissing sound—“We hissed along the polished ice in games,” says Wordsworth—or a […]

When the world knows you are a Methodist minister, for instance, it will admit that you may also be a violinist, or a chemist, or a poet, and will credit you therefor. And so if it condemns you for being a thief, it should at the same time admire you for being a genius. If […]

Do you know why it is that I look back to the horizon at the figure of an unkempt, rough child, and why I feel a surging torrent of tears and anguish and despair? I feel more than that indeed, but I have no words to tell it. I shall have to miss forever some […]